VeeamUPAvailability for the Modern Data Center: Business & IT Perspectives

Volume# 01

Exploding the 5 Myths of Business-Critical Application Virtualization

Why virtualizing the applications that keep your business running can improve availability, performance and manageability

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Introduction

The truth about virtualizing business-critical applications

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You know that virtualization is an ideal way to reduce data center costs while also improving application availability – and business productivity. You’ve probably already virtualized non-critical applications to help use your server resources more efficiently and slow down data center sprawl. It’s likely that virtualiza-tion has given you a more efficient infrastructure that’s easier to manage, help-ing your IT function and your whole business become more agile and respond quickly to new demands and opportunities. So what’s stopping you from bring-ing virtualization advantages to your business-critical applications as well?

Application owners within your business may have concerns about the cost and complexity of virtualizing business-critical applications. But it’s the perceived risks that are often the deal-breakers when considering virtualizing applica-tions, which, if they were to go down, could bring the business to a standstill and cause significant revenue loss.

In this guide, we expose the truth behind the myths that could be stopping you from creating a fully-virtualized application environment that lowers costs, im-proves reliability and boosts business agility.

We show how you can convince the owners of key systems that are the core of your operations, such as databases, email servers and CRM systems, that virtu-alization will make their applications run better, scale faster, become easier to manage and deliver availability that exceeds SLAs.

Read on to discover:

• Why performance concerns should be consigned to history• The hidden costs of not virtualizing business-critical applications• How virtualization can improve availability• Why backup and recovery can be faster and easier• Why virtualized system failure and security fears are unfounded

Introduction The truth about virtualizing business-critical applications

01“My applications won’t perform as well as they do on physical systems.”

myth

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A lot of your application owners will think virtualized systems can’t deliver the level of performance they get from physical servers. They’ll say that virtualization impedes performance, and then they’ll point out that applications running on physical servers have an entire system dedicated to that workload, providing all the compute power the application will ever need.

A few years ago, they would have been right; virtualization couldn’t deliver the performance levels that physical hardware achieved. Today, modern virtualiza-tion platforms have left this rationale behind.

Now, it’s possible to achieve the same levels of performance on Virtual Machines (VMs) that you see in physical systems. With the right tools and configuration, you can also expect to see far higher levels of application performance on virtu-alized systems.

Application owners might think it makes their lives easier, but having an entire physical system dedicated to a single application just doesn’t make sense in a modern enterprise IT environment. The data center costs and complexity issues are simply too huge to ignore.

So if you can get better performance from a VM and instant scalability to meet peaks in demand and changing business needs, it makes sense to virtualize as many applications as possible. And when you improve the performance and scalability of your business-critical applications – the ones that really drive your bottom line – you don’t just get a streamlined, efficient IT infrastructure; you get much greater business agility and a faster time-to-market.

Myth #1:

“My applications won’t perform as well as they do on physical systems.”

02“It will cost too much to virtualize all our applications.”

myth

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It’s true that if you want to run a fully-virtualized enterprise IT environment, you’ll need some serious hardware to run it on. Server consolidation means trading in many legacy servers for fewer, more powerful systems – and that costs money.

In truth, however, this is really false economizing. The powerful new servers you invest in will also be significantly more efficient. You’ll also have fewer servers to support. That means you’ll have significantly lower power and cooling costs and a much smaller overall data-center footprint.

It also means that administration will take far less time and fewer resources, so skilled IT staff can focus on delivering the innovations that add value to the busi-ness, instead of spending all of their time on routine maintenance.

So even though it’s true that some upfront investment may be required, the total cost of ownership over the life of your systems should be dramatically lower. You’ll actually end up creating more opportunities to turn IT into a driver of busi-ness value – instead of a cost center.

That all probably sounds great to you, but a lot of your application owners will still probably be more concerned about the licensing implications of virtualizing business-critical applications, as opposed to the overall data center cost consid-erations.

The cost of licensing for virtualized environments is often viewed as too expen-sive. Every VM needs an operating system license (and often more than one, in multi-OS environments), licenses for each application instance and possibly Cli-ent Access Licenses.

The fact is, you’ll still need all these licenses if you’re running applications on physical systems, but for physical servers you’ll also have all the additional power, cooling and infrastructure costs. Some vendors will actually offer licensing breaks for virtualized environments, enabling you to run multiple instances at a far lower cost than would be possible on physical systems.

So you could potentially reduce the TCO of your business-critical applications significantly by running them on fewer, more efficient servers, while also keeping licensing costs under control.

Myth #2:

“It will cost too much to virtualize all our applications.”

03“VMs can’t be backed up properly – so I won’t be able to meet the SLAs for mybusiness-critical applications.”

myth

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In the new age of the Always-On Business™, high availability isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s absolutely essential. Backup and recoverability concerns prevent many peo-ple from virtualizing their business-critical applications. They often think that backup and recovery are impeded because VMs don’t have a physical disk drive to back up to, and because they’re always active, it’s impossible to be sure of their state in the event of a failure. Application owners, particularly those respon-sible for business-critical applications, have to meet tough SLAs, and they need to know they can rely on backup and recovery systems to keep downtime to an absolute minimum.

In fact, modern backup and recovery solutions can achieve RPOs and RTOs of fewer than 15 minutes for any application, whether it’s virtualized or not. And vir-tualized systems actually offer much faster recovery for business-critical applica-tions than physical systems.

Because backups are based on snapshot images of the VM, there’s no need fortime-consuming OS installations during recovery process, which are necessary on physical systems. Your DR teams can simply retrieve the VM image and get the VM, and the application it’s running, back up again almost immediately. Recov-eries that could take hours or even days with traditional backup and recovery systems can now be completed in fewer than 15 minutes.

What’s more, you can actually restore guest files in just a few minutes, instead of waiting until the entire VM is restored. That means users can regain access to critical files and get back to work while your teams finish fixing the underlying problem.

It also means your application owners can be confident they’ll meet their SLAs, and you really can enable an Always-On Business – maximizing productivity and minimizing the risk of lost revenue due to application downtime.

Myth #3:

“VMs can’t be backed up properly – so I won’t be able to meet the SLAs for my business-critical applications.”

04“Virtualization isn’t safe for business-critical applications – it creates a single point of failure.”

myth

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It’s true that, in theory, a hardware failure can become a single point of failure that will impact all VMs running on the host. In practice, however, there are many tools available to prevent this from happening. There are all kinds of solutions for failover, backup and disaster recovery in virtualized environments. It’s actually much simpler to isolate a VM and replicate it to a geographically separate recov-ery site – reducing the risk to other systems.

In addition, running many physical servers actually increases the risk of failure. If you’ve got 10 servers, then you’re 10 times more likely to experience a hardware failure than if you are running just one server that’s hosting VMs running the same workloads that the 10 servers would have run.

If you follow the classic 3-2-1 backup rule, the risks to data from business-critical applications are reduced even further.

• 3: Have at least three copies: the probability of all three devices failing at the same time is tiny

• 2: Store the copies on two different media: to mitigate the risk of double fail-ure on one storage type

• 1: Keep one backup copy offsite: if there’s a fire at your primary storage site, you’ve got a copy that’s physically separate

This triple-layer approach reduces the probability of business-critical data loss from hardware failure down to infinitesimal levels and removes many of the key application owner concerns about ensuring 24/7 data access for the applications your business depends on.

Myth #4:

“Virtualization isn’t safe for business-critical applications – it creates a single point of failure.”

05“If one application is compromised, it puts every application at risk.”

myth

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Another reason people give for not virtualizing business-critical applications is if there is an infection or breach of a single application, every application in the virtual infrastructure will be at risk. For business-critical application owners, the chance of a compromised non-critical application infecting the systems that keep your business running is not worth the risk.

In truth, however, such fears are completely unfounded. Isolation and segrega-tion are fundamental principles of virtualization, so these types of environments have had protection from cross-infection built into them since their inception. Modern hypervisors also have a very small – and very hard – attack surface, which makes it extremely difficult to compromise multiple VMs.

Advances in network virtualization have also made it possible to deploy an entire virtual network, with firewalls, routers and switches, which you can control and secure just as you would a physical network.

Myth #5:

“If one application is compromised, it puts every application at risk.”

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СonclusionAll gain, no pain

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The myths about virtualizing business-critical applications really are just myths. It’s now possible to achieve full virtualization without adding cost and complex-ity to your IT infrastructure or putting business-critical applications at risk. Today you can reduce data center expenses and improve the performance and avail-ability of the applications that really make a difference to your business, which helps you increase business agility and productivity while also lowering costs.

With the right tools in place, you no longer need to ask if you can afford to virtu-alize business-critical applications, but rather if you can afford not to.

Veeam Availability Suite™ v8 provides high-speed recovery, proactive protec-tion and complete visibility of your entire virtualized infrastructure, eliminating common risk factors and empowering you to virtualize almost any workload with confidence.

Visit www.veeam.com to find out more.

Сonclusion All gain, no pain

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